This is a cross-posting from the OpenGLAM blog written by Michael Smethurst, development producer at the BBC – see the original post. An invite On Saturday, 18th January 2014 between 10am and 5pm the BBC is teaming up with the Open Knowledge Foundation’s OpenGLAM initiative, Creative Commons UK and the Wikimedia community to host an […]
This is a cross-post from the Sunlight Foundation blog, written by Director of Sunlight Labs, Tom Lee. See the original post here. The recent Open Government Partnership meetings in London have provided a good opportunity to assess the direction of our community. The latest comes from Jonathan Gray, and the title — Open government should […]
The following guest post is by Linda Raftree. Linda works with Plan International USA, serves as a special advisor on ICTs and M&E for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Evaluation Office and is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation Open Development Working Group. A core theme that the Open Development track covered at September’s Open Knowledge […]
The following guest post is by Kersti Ruth Wissenbach, an independent consultant for Open for Change and the Open Knowledge Foundation Ambassador for the Neatherlands. Kicking off during Open Development Camp 2013, Open for Change and the Open Knowledge Foundation Open Development working group are launching a series of debates aimed at engaging the global […]
Only two weeks to go until the third Open Development Camp will bring together an international crowd to discuss lessons learned and future implications around Open Development. Have a look at the preliminary program and join us on 7 & 8 November in Amsterdam for a reality check on Open Development. ODC13 is more than […]
The following guest post is by Duncan Edwards from the Institute of Development Studies. I’ve had a lingering feeling of unease that things were not quite right in the world of open development and ICT4D (Information and communication technology for development), so at September’s Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva I took advantage of the presence […]
The following guest post is by Waltraut Ritter, a member of Opendata Hong Kong, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Local Group. It is the first of two posts exploring the current state of open data in Asia. The Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva attracted delegates from 55 countries, indicating that open, public data is indeed becoming […]
The following guest post is by Leigh Dodds, and is cross-posted from his blog. To be successful the web sacrificed some of the features of hypertext systems. Things like backwards linking and link integrity, etc. One of the great things about the web is that its possible to rebuild some of those features, but in […]
The following guest post is by Florencia Coelho, from Argentinian daily La Nacion. In Argentina, where a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has yet to be signed, LA NACION and three transparency NGOs – Poder Ciudadano, ACIJ (Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia) and Fundación Directorio Legislativo joined efforts to produce the first […]
The following post is by Paul Maassen, who together with Daniel Dietrich and Anders Pedersen will be coordinating the workshop ‘Raising the bar for ambition and quality in OGP: workshop to develop a ‘Civil Society National OGP Review’, to be held on Tuesday 17 September, 14:45 – 16:00 @ Room 5, Floor 3, as part of […]
This article, by Marc Joffe and Ian MakGill, originally appeared on the Guardian website on 01 August 2013. Marc Joffe will be speaking in the Open Finance and OpenSpending – Workshop on Wednesday 18 September, 14:45 – 16:00 @ Room 7, Floor 2. Open governance groups around the world compare local authority finances Council finances […]
The following guest post is by Guillermo Moncecchi. In a previous post, we advocated for the generation of a Public Digital Infrastructure (PDI), suggesting that governments should advance in the provision of open digital capabilities, free of restrictions, to do, within the law, whatever we want with them. These capabilities would be built on top […]
The following guest post is by Chris Sakkas. A few months ago, we ran into a problem at work. ‘Let’s open source this,’ my boss said, and then ran a conventional brainstorming session. I am constantly frustrated by people misusing terms like free, libre and open that have well-established definitions. I decided to spend an […]
The following post is by Graham Steel. It is an adaptation of a five minute lightning talk given at Glasgow’s 1st Open Knowledge Foundation meet-up. Commencing in 2001, I became involved in the Charitable Sector as Vice-Chair of a support group for families affected by a rare and invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease. This led to […]
The following guest post is by Matthew Todd, Senior Lecturer at the School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney and Sydney Ambassador of the Open Knowledge Foundation. As part of OKCon 2013 Matthew will host a satellite event entitled ‘Is Open Source Drug Discovery Practical?’, taking place on on Thursday 19 September from 09:00 – 12:00 […]
The following guest post is by Chistian Quintili from Open Ricostruzione. Open Ricostruzione is an Italian civic project focused on people engagement after the earthquake which damaged cities of Emilia-Romagna in 2012 Open Ricostruzione is pleased to have a little corner in the OKF network. Our project, in short, is a website to monitor public […]
The following guest post is by Iulian Pogor (World Bank), Meghan Cook (University at Albany) , Barbara Ubaldi (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development– OECD), and Ton Zijlstra (Open Knowledge Foundation) who are among the coordinators of the workshop Open Data Toolkits and Assessment Tools, which will take place at OKCon 2013, as part of the Open Development and Sustainability programme, on Tuesday […]
The following guest post is by Lorna Campbell, former assistant director of the Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (CETIS). It is cross-posted from her blog. Last night Sheila and I went along to the first meeting of the Open Knowledge Foundation in Glasgow. The meeting was hosted by the Electron Club and the […]
This is a guest post by Marc Joffe of Public Sector Credit Solutions. Many have noticed that the United States last week was struck by its biggest municipal bankruptcy ever, when the City of Detroit declared bankruptcy. Less well known is the fact that Moody’s, the major credit rating agency, downgraded the City of Chicago […]
Cross-posted from the OKCon Blog. Introducing a series of guest posts by OKCon 2013 speakers that we will publish over the coming weeks. This first post is by Laura Meggiolaro, Land Portal Coordinator, International Land Coalition, who will be speaking on the main stage during the Open Development and Sustainability session on Wednesday 18th September […]
The following guest post is by Farida Vis from the Everyday Growing Cultures research project. The project looks at the potentially transformative effect of bringing together the food growing and open data communities. Those supporting the government’s open data agenda highlight the business case for open data, an economic argument about its moneysaving potential, along […]
The following guest post is by Travis Korte from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. The Knight Foundation received hundreds of submissions to its “Knight News Challenge on Open Gov.,” a competition designed to create new tools to improve how citizens interact with government. The applicants noted a number of problems with government data: confusing […]
The following post is by Aidan McGuire, co-founder of ScraperWiki. It is cross-posted on the ScraperWiki blog. ScraperWiki are looking for open data activists to try out our new “Open your data” tool. Since its first launch ScraperWiki has worked closely with the Open Data community. Today we’re building on this commitment by pre-announcing the […]
The following guest post is by Chris Taggart of OpenCorporates. Here he rounds-up recent developments within the field of Open Company Data. This article is cross-posted from http://blog.opencorporates.com/, published by Chrinon Ltd, a company dedicated to improving and publishing public data under an open licence that allows and encourages reuse, including commercially (direct link to […]
The following guest post is by Chris Martin, researcher at the University of Leeds. Here he presents the results of his recent research into perceptions of the barriers to open government data. He looks at the similarities and differences between public and non-profit sector perceptions, pointing to the utility of greater cross-sectoral collaboration. Earlier in […]
The following guest post is by the Open Contracting Partnership, announcing the release of their Principles for Open Contracting. It is cross-posted from their website. Over the past year, the Open Contracting Partnership has facilitated a global consultation process to create a set of global principles that can serve as a guide for all of […]
The following guest post is from Tom Steinberg, Director at mySociety. The organisation that I run, mySociety, has just launched our biggest project in three years, and as open data hackers I thought it might tickle your fancy. FixMyTransport.com has been built with two goals – to make it easier for people to report public […]
The following guest post is from Dominic Byrne from Fingal Open Data. This post is cross-posted from the Fingal Open Data blog. We were at Ireland’s first Open Data 18 hour Challenge. Here’s what happened … Ireland’s first Open Data 18 hour Challenge took place in Dublin on 4th and 5th July, 2011. Fingal County […]
The following guest post is by Jürgen Neumann, from the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance. Jürgen will be joining us at OKCon 2011 as part of a panel on Open Hardware and Open Standards As the free open source paradigm is shifting towards open everything, there are still a few obstacles to completely shift […]
The following guest post is by Alek Tarkowski from the Centrum Cyfrowe, a think-and-do-tank fostering digital society in Poland. Alek will be joining us at OKCon 2011 for his talk On the road to Open Data in Poland – Where Are We Now? “Open budget” is a project started by Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt: Polska, a […]
The following guest post is from Augusto Herrmann, Christian Miranda and Nitai Bezerra, from the Open Data team at the Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management. They are all members of the Open Knowledge Foudation’s Working Group on Open Government Data. We are a team of three people working on open data at the Brazilian […]
Jens Finnäs is a freelance journalist based in Helsinki, the author of Dataist, a blog about data journalism, and a member of the OKF’s Working Groups on Open Government Data and EU Open Data. Parliamentary elections in Finland are usually rather dull. Rarely does the rest of the world bother to pay any attention. But […]
The following is a guest post from Chris Taggart, co-founder of OpenCorporates.com and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data. When the amazing Emer Coleman first approached me a year and a half to get feedback on the plans for the London datastore, I told her that the gold standard […]
The following guest post is from Jim Michalko, VP in charge of the OCLC Research Library Partnership. Karen Calhoun, former VP of Metadata Applications, who has previously been working on these issues, has recently left OCLC to relocate and begin the first phase of her retirement. She has transitioned her role as OCLC’s spokesperson for […]
The following guest post is from Owen Stephens, who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. Discovery is a new JISC funded initiative to help realise a vision set out in 2010 by the JISC and Research Libraries UK (RLUK) ‘Resource Discovery Taskforce’ (RDTF). The RDTF Vision is […]
The following guest post is from Niels Erik Kaaber Rasmussen, Founder of ItsYourParliament.eu and member of the OKF’s Working Groups on EU Open Data and Open Government Data. Most people are unaware that the political parties they know from their national parliaments behave differently in an European context. Two Danish parties for example belong to […]
The following post is from Esa Mäkinen, an open data advocate, a journalist at Helsingin Sanomat and member of the OKF’s Working Groups on EU Open Data and Open Government Data. Finnish novels used to be 200 pages long in the 1910s. A few hundred years later and the novels are longer: nowadays they are […]
The following guest post is from Regards Citoyens, a French organisation that promotes open data. Three months ago, the French Prime Minister announced officially the creation of the EtaLab governmental team, dedicated to the future data.gouv.fr. On Friday May 27th, two official texts have been published: a decree (fr) that defines new juridic rules regarding […]
The following guest post is from Tom Chance (@tom_chance), founder of OpenEcoMaps. This post is cross posted from the London Datastore blog with permission from the author. What happens when open data is wrong? Can crowdsourcing improve it? Often, open data enthusiasts assume that the next step after the release of some government data is […]
The following guest post is from David Pidsley who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Knowledge in Development. Open Data for Development Camp (ODDC) on 12th and 13th May 2011 in Amsterdam focuses on how developers, practitioners and policy makers can harness open international development data more effectively. During […]
The following is a guest post from Jindrich Mynarz at the National Technical Library in Prague, Czech Republic, member of the OpenData.cz initiative, and one of the organizers of the Big Clean in Prague. The Open Knowledge Foundation has just launched the okfn-cz mailing list: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-cz The short URL is: http://bit.ly/okfn-cz The intent of the […]
The following guest post is from Sverre Andreas Lunde-Danbolt who works for the Department for ICT and renewal in the Norwegian Ministry of Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs, and who is a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data The Norwegian Ministry of Government Administration and Reform have just sent a […]
The following guest post is by Matt Rosenberg of Seattle, founder of the non-profit Public Eye Northwest and the news knowledge base site Public Data Ferret, a Seattle Times local news partner. There’s no dispute that mandated public disclosure in accordance with freedom of information and open meetings laws is a cornerstone of any modern […]
The following is a guest post from Jindrich Mynarz at the National Technical Library in Prague, Czech Republic, member of the OpenData.cz initiative, and one of the organizers of the Big Clean in Prague. On the Saturday, March 19th, the Big Clean workshop took place as a twin event in two cities, Prague (Czech Republic) […]
The following guest post is from Alex Stinson, Campus Ambassador at Oxford University for Wikipedia The London Wikipedia Academy is a mini-conference aimed at starting a conversation between academics and Wikipedians in London, moving from ethereal opinions to organised, evidence based, informed discussions. There will be a number of exciting speakers all engaging in a […]
The following guest post is by Claudia Elliot from Publish What You Fund. IATI XML data After two years of negotiating, the 18 donors of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) agreed on February 9th the final details of a new global standard for publishing aid information. This format makes aid information internationally comparable, and […]
The following guest post is by Aman Grewal and Carlos de la Fuente, from the World Wide Web Foundation and CTIC Foundation Last year we witnessed an impressive expansion of Open Government Data initiatives all around the world. We can assert without any doubt that it was clearly the year when Open Government spread throughout […]
The following guest post is by Cynthia O’Murchu, investigative reporter at the Financial Times, and previously their deputy interactive editor. She is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data At its inception, “Europe’s Hidden Billions”, a joint investigation by the Financial Times and the then newly formed Bureau of […]
The following guest post is by Zuzana Wienk, from the Slovakian watchdog the Fair Play Alliance. She is also a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data When we started to build a data catalogue of all possible flows of public finances to the private sphere in 2003, we had no […]
The following guest post is from Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain It’s The Year of the eBook! Project Gutenberg, the granddaddy of all eBook libraries, announced today they have put number 40,000 of internally produced free eBooks online as of March […]
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